Meta faces antitrust fine according to abusive practises

Recent­ly, the Com­mis­si­on announ­ced that it has impo­sed an anti­trust fine of €797.72 mil­li­on on the Meta Group. The fine was issued for a vio­la­ti­on of Artic­le 102 TFEU and the pro­hi­bi­ti­on of abu­se of mar­ket domi­nan­ce sti­pu­la­ted the­r­ein. The under­ta­king alle­gedly favor­ed its own online clas­si­fied ads ser­vice over com­pe­ti­tors on its platform.

The Com­mis­si­on iden­ti­fied the abu­se through two spe­ci­fic practices:

1. Meta tyed its online clas­si­fied ads ser­vice, Face­book Mar­ket­place, with its per­so­nal social net­wor­king plat­form, Face­book. As a result, all regu­lar Face­book users are auto­ma­ti­cal­ly shown con­tent from Face­book Mar­ket­place. This inte­gra­ti­on alo­ne grants Meta’s clas­si­fied ads ser­vice a signi­fi­cant dis­tri­bu­ti­on advan­ta­ge, poten­ti­al­ly exclu­ding com­pe­ti­tors from the market.
2. Meta also impo­sed unfair tra­ding con­di­ti­ons on other pro­vi­ders of online clas­si­fied ads ser­vices when they sought to adver­ti­se on Meta’s plat­forms. Nota­b­ly, access to adver­ti­sing data from other adver­ti­sers was gran­ted exclu­si­ve­ly to Face­book Marketplace.

The Com­mis­si­on has pro­hi­bi­ted this con­duct by Meta and impo­sed the fine in addition.